Addressing the letter to the editor by Andrew Nguyen about “those Asians,” I would like to say that there is no problem with an Asian-American coming to a U.S. school. There’s nothing wrong with a black, white, Hispanic, Indian, you-name-it student coming to a U.S. school. The problem isn’t the race, the problem is the economy.

We are in a competitive market with China, and when Chinese (not Asian-American) students come to our universities to learn about first-world engineering, first-world agronomy and so-on, where does that technology end up? Chinese students don’t come to Iowa State because they plan on making the university a landmark; they don’t come to Iowa State because they want to help the U.S. economy; they don’t come to Iowa State because they want to gain a global perspective on things. They come here to learn our technologies and take them back to China.

Let’s be honest, what we are doing here by permitting the enrollment of thousands of Chinese students is essentially the equivalent of telling the 1970s-era Soviet Union how to build a better bomb. The Cold War was obviously about military technologies, but this new struggle is about every technology. We are permitting our economic enemy to find out how to boost its economy.

I read an article in The Wall Street Journal recently about how China’s government actually insists that its citizens copy Western inventions and technologies. China has its own knockoff “Apple” store, and litigation is being pursued because the knockoff named its product “iPad” in China before Apple did.

Now that you have been educated on these nonimmigrant foreign students, maybe you’ll have a different perspective on why patriotic people like myself are tired of watching our tax dollars get spent on BMWs and Corvettes.